Many property owners feared they would be ‘fleeced’ by government rent controls, compulsory reserve funds, or increases in the basic real estate tax.… - Götz Aly
" "Many property owners feared they would be ‘fleeced’ by government rent controls, compulsory reserve funds, or increases in the basic real estate tax. Indeed, a few months later, Economics Minister Walther Funk announced: ‘So-called real value assets [Substanzwerte] will represent an especially lucrative source of state revenue after the war.’ And in early 1944, Reich economists began discussing new ways ‘to better exploit property owners to cover state debts.’ Polemics against landlords continued to appear in party organs such as Das schwarze Korps, the official newspaper of the SS.
About Götz Aly
Götz Haydar Aly, (born 3 May 1947) is a German journalist, historian and political scientist.
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Significantly, the will to achieve social reform was strongest among those leaders within the Nazi Party who were also the most actively involved in pushing forward the agenda of ethnic genocide. The idea of a huge pension increase in 1944 was budgetary insanity. Yet some within the Nazi hierarchy supported it for the ‘psychological dividends it would pay among our working ethnic comrades [Volksgenossen].’ They called for ‘blue- and white-collar workers to be put on equal footing’ to give them a preliminary taste of the harmonious future to come, which would be achieved through a ‘generous reform of the social welfare state in the interest of working people.’
The policy of plunder was the cornerstone for the welfare of the German people and a major guarantor of their political loyalty, which was first and foremost based on material considerations. The unshakable alliance between the state and the people was not primarily the result of cleverly conceived party propaganda. It was created by means of theft, with the spoils being redistributed according to equalitarian principles among the member of the ethnically defined Volk.
The National Socialist German Workers Party was founded on a doctrine of inequality between races, but it also promised Germans greater equality among themselves than they had enjoyed during either the Wilhemine empire or the Weimar Republic. In practice, this goal was achieved at the expense of other groups, by means of a racist war of conquest. Nazi ideology conceived of a racial conflict as an antidote to class conflict. By framing its program in this way, the party was propagating two age-old dreams of the German people: national and class unity. That was the key to the Nazis’ popularity, from which they derived the power they needed to pursue their criminal aims. The ideal of the Volksstaat—a state of and for the people—was what we would now call a welfare state for Germans with the proper racial pedigree.